Madison, Wisconsin

On the left, Lake Mendota, covered in ice.
This just down the street from the Lowell Center, where I stay. On the right, a snow disk above the lake, on campus.

The google map reference for here is http://maps.google.com/maps?oi=map&q=Madison,+WI,
and for home is: http://www.google.com/local?f=q&hl=en&&ll=53.392286,-6.633682&spn=0.024824,0.058966

The meeting on Complex Analysis, in honour of Ahern, Nagle, and Rosay was quite outstanding, with a lot of high-powered folk present, and a very high standard of talk. Madison is an amazingly pleasant place, with all this water-scenery, a tremendous variety of restaurants, and more coffee-houses to the square mile than Amsterdam. Good place to do mathematics.

By the way, apologies to visitors to my blog for the unpleasant ads that appeared in the last couple of days. This was no doubt view to the fact that in my remarks about my delayed luggage I made light-hearted mention of the replacement of my unmentionables, and this provoked, via the wonders of search-engine technology, a spate of ads about precisely those, which were really quite offensive. I'm experimenting with this business of ads, and if there is much more of this kind of thing, I'll pull the plug. In general, the ads that pop up are reasonably-related to my content, and actually informative for me.

Back in the USA

First time since the Spring of 2001. Last time, I visited Webster in Chicago (to talk about involutions), and Kaufman at Urbana (to talk about the Zygmund class).
Apart from those luminaries, the high points were the ride on the City of New Orleans to and from Urbana, with Arlo Guthrie's rendition of Steve Goodman's song playing in my mind, and the amazing Art Institute of Chicago.

Various little things went wrong, mostly due to some rather bad winds in the midwest. My connection from Chicago to Madison was cancelled (that's how I spell that), and my bag went missing for a couple of days, but it all worked out. I found as always, how very easy Americans are to get along with, and encountered much kindness and good humour. Apart from various airline employees and hotel staff who just did their jobs efficiently and with exemplary courtesy, I met Tom and Loretta Dichraff, a retired couple from Madison, who went out of their way to the extent of offering me a lift to the University from the airport.

Funny the things that affect you. I had a plain sugared doughnut at O'Hare yesterday morning, with a cup of weak and gratuitously-sweetened coffee, and the first bite of the doughnut brought a rush of recollection, and tears to my eyes. It wasn't that it was so good (it was fine), but that it was exactly the same as always, and they never make a doughnut just like that at home. You taste it, and you know you're in America.

On the plane across the Atlantic, I sat with a young man from Iran, who was going to San Francisco to get married. Security and immigration at Dublin took me seconds flat. The only intrusion was that they recorded my index fingerprints at immigration. (I recall that they took my thumbprint many years ago, so that's 3 digits down and 7 to go.) They gave him the third degree, strip-searched him, and took about an hour going over his story. They explained that it was required for people from Iran, among other places. He found it harrowing. Being picked out like that always raises hackles. I remember how it felt when the British police used to pull all the Irish people out of the ferry queues, in the seventies and eighties. At first, you had some sympathy, but eventually you got tired of it.

Hackles are feathers, on a bird's neck. I've now become very interested in hackles. They are exactly what you need to make those ruff-like arrangements you see behind the head of a
dry artificial fly. You wind them round the shank and they splay out perfectly.

The only fishing going on here in Madison at present is ice-fishing. They are forecasting snow for this evening.

Website Stuff

I've been studying the circle of protocols and languages useful for web pages: html, xhtml, css, ssi, perl, javascript, php. There is an outstanding site with tutorials on these things, at http://www.htmlite.com. I tried out the stuff on my sites at the Maths Department, and Logic Press.

Cascading style sheets allow you to alter the entire look of a whole site by editing one file. One issue is that the gurus deprecate the use of colour names such as green, magenta, etc, and so you end up learning about RGB descriptions of colours. This has been a bit of an adventure. I keep trying things, and being surprised by the result. For instance, equal red, green and blue, such as #ffffff (that's three 255's in hexadecimal) gives white, as you would expect, but if you drop the red just a little bit, say to #f0ffff, then you get a very pale and dreamy green.

Now there's a funny thing. The blog editor that comes with this site allows me to wysiwig in the html code for the above colour, which I pick from a pallette of 80 colours. It also allows me to edit the html, and change the colour to #f0ffff, but if I do, then the text vanishes in the previewer! Maybe if I go ahead and publish it, your browser or mine will display it; why not? Maybe the previewer is set up to recognise only colours from that pallette. Let's try. The end of this sentence is written in a pale and dreamy green, but if it ends at the comma, then I'm wrong.

Do you see the text after the comma, in very pale green? Aha! It's there, by gum, but I now see that my page has a very pale pink background, and the pale and dreamy green has become an almost invisible slightly yellower shade, and you don't see it at first. It's a special case of a general problem: it's really easy to make stuff invisible on a web page.

Another issue is what it takes to get a server-side include included by the server. I find inconsistent behaviour between different servers. The server running at Maths
handles something like (I had a bit of ssi code here, but it got excluded when I saved it! Blog-editor-side-exclude, I guess.) by sticking the contents of test.shtml into the current file before sending it out to the browser. But the server running at Host Ireland won't seem to do this unless I rename the current file so that its extension is .shtml instead of .html. What is this? Once I have a page up, and people have found it and bookmarked it, I don't want to change its name, nor do I want to go around installing redirects all over the place. Apart from anything else, people get nervous when you redirect them these days: they are afraid you are sending them to a russian mobsite that will hijack their computer and use it to sell porn.

This is not good, because the gurus want us to use server-side includes instead of frames to put stuff such as navigation bars and, well, frames on and around our pages. It seems that frames don't work too well if you are displaying the page on some exotic device, and people are using more and more exotic devices these days.